Ricardo Miller Leaves Team

I know there was a fake Devin Gardner page out there but this one has 1200 friends and several pictures of Miller taken from cellphones and the like. Looks legit to me.

Miller bounced to and from tight end after arriving early, never finding playing time. With walk-ons seeing snaps ahead of him the writing was on the wall—time to move on. As a redshirt sophomore his departure does open up a scholarship slot in the next class. That brings Michigan to 23 plus any guys who don't get a fifth year; they currently have 22 plus maybe longsnapper Scott Sypniewski. Gareon Conley is wavering, of course.

Also: yeah, Miller's getting a degree in three years. Good luck to him.

He was also initially a top 3 overall kid in the state of Florida (that Florida) before he moved up here for senior year in high school. I followed his recruitment pretty closely. He's a great kid. I understand his move and wish him well.

Ricardo Miller was a kid who was big and fast-ish early, so as a sophomore he was getting a lot of press and hype, which led to him being an early top recruit in Florida. It didn't hurt that he played for one of the top programs in FL. Like many other kids, everyone else caught up and he plateaued.

Interestingly enough, Marvin Robinson was a kid people thought might be the top recruit in Florida in the same year for similar reasons. MRob has seen the field a lot more than Ricardo Miller, but he still hasn't been the stud many thought he'd be.

DJ Shoemate was a guy who starred as a sophomore for a big program in Southern California (Servite) and went to SC after committing super early. Never played, went to UConn when the sanctions hit and fumbled against us in 2010, then faded away due to injuries. Just a kid who matured young but never had a position or great talent.

I'm just surprised Jimmy Clausen and Matt Barkley panned out as well as they did since both had question marks (competition in Clausen's case, kind of shitty stats in Barkley's) despite peaking so early in the recruiting process because they played for big time high schools as young kids.

That and to take AP classes if I remember correctly. Then Pioneer turned him into a TE because their option offense doesn't have receivers, so I figured that plus who scouts Ann Arbor games was why he dropped in the rankings. One of the reasons we were so hip on him was the All Star academics/personality.

Maybe they moved him to tight end because he wasn't fast enough to play receiver. It was pretty obvious that he didn't have very good speed. He ran like an average high school tight end, even though he was only about 200-210 lbs. He was not a Michigan-caliber receiver. Rodriguez's final full class (2010) is now down to 14 players after originally being 27-strong.

I don't know if his speed was receiver-level or not (if you met the receiver corps of Groves High School circa 1998 you'd have a low opinion of "receiver speed" for high school too), but the team ran a dedicated zone-read and option offense with this little QB. The MGoCreeper van did the Saginaw Hill and Inkster games, which ended up being a lot of blocking and getting open for passes that were overthrown or underthrown or never thrown. On the other hand he didn't look like a blue chip there.

He wasn't TE sized in high school. He was just bigger than the other kids they had playing receiver (there were a couple of small buggers with jetpacks) and Miller was bigger and stronger so they made him a TE.

As a young lad I too was wooed by the shapely form of the goddess Polisci. Just know, Ricardo, that she can be a cruel mistress. Especially when you're reading Hegel at 3am or on your 6th straight hour of Mountain Dew and ggplots. Godspeed, Ricardo, Godspeed.